Youth Castles

Just as certainly as Manchester is always going to have it’s fair share of Liam Gallagher wannabes, Brooklyn is forever going to be pumping out the most exciting aspects of modern pop music. In past eras, it’d have taken the right contacts and the right shows for news of them to get out into the wide world, but now all it takes is a copy of garage band and… well, still the right contacts, but at least it’s a slightly more democratic model.

Youth Castles have a name so unforgettable and clichéd that it takes more than a little resistance to override your gag reflex. But beneath that generic veneer is a band that manage to make some genuinely interesting garage-pop song. The Pains of Being Pure at heart brought a certain sort of energy to the table when they started making their shoegaze tinged pop, and there’s remnants of that here, though with the camp exuberance swapped for a sort of gritty realism – shoegaze with an aggressive hangover, perhaps. there’s a 6 track EP to be released in spring, and given the fact that they’ve already got a booking agent and PR set up, it’s likely that you’ll hear about it before the band themselves do. For the minute, there’s a trio of tracks for streaming, and they’re all excellent enough to make your heart ache because you were born on the wrong side of the Atlantic.